'Patang': Emotions float above a visit home ★★★

August 23, 2012|Michael Phillips | Movie critic

Hamid (Hamid Shaikh) and Azhur (Azhurudin Shaikh) wait intently in a scene from the film "Patang."

The setup is as cross-culturally durable as anything in Chekhov or Ozu or Kiarostami. A man returns to his hometown after being away for a long spell. Tensions arise within the family. New attachments form; old stresses emerge. The surroundings, the buildings, the people look comforting to the prodigal son, but strange too.

The skies in Chicago-based filmmaker Prashant Bhargava's debut feature "Patang" are dotted with kites. "Patang" ("The Kite") already has enjoyed several brief engagements in the Chicago area as well as around the world, on the festival circuit and in limited commercial release. Photographed and set during the Uttarayan kite festival in Ahmedabad, India, Bhargava's film is an impressive calling card for what looks like a bright directorial future.

I'll be honest: It took me two attempts to get the hang of the picture's ambient strengths, and to get past a pretty clumsy introduction. After a five-year absence, Delhi businessman Jayesh (Mukund Shukla) has come home with his daughter (Sugandha Garg). Jayesh has a plan in mind regarding the family's rambling, homey mansion run by Jayesh's sister-in-law (Seema Biswas, the film's eloquent emotional core). As the festival commences, his daughter chafes, demurely, at her father's unwillingness to let her explore, with her movie camera, on her own. She finds love, or something like it, with a young man who works at his father's electronics store.

Over the course of two days, "Patang" dips in and out of various characters' experiences before and during the annual ritual that pulls Jayesh, like a kite, back into his own past. Lest he risk too much audience confusion, co-writer, director and editor Bhargava introduces each major character with big, bright name tags on screen, and it feels like a cheat, or a storytelling deficiency. Wisely, though, the movie soon settles in and doesn't go in for much story per se. The people on screen (typically shown in extreme telephoto close-up, as if the filmmaker couldn't get enough — understandably — of some of these faces) fold into the tumult of the kite festival, and no one narrative line dominates.

The cutting rhythm of the picture, quite apart from the cutting strategies of the kite fliers, can get a little frantic, coupled with the hand-held camera. The movie doesn't need the push. The director is both a humanist and a real talent.